On Women's Different Voices: Jane Addams and Elizabeth Anscombe

It is now forty years since the publication of Carol Gilligan's hugely influential book: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982). It is not an exaggeration to say that the argument of this book was foundational for the field of feminist ethics, even though it was not directly a work of moral theory. Rather, Gilligan was engaged in challenging a psychological model of post-conventional individual moral development, pioneered by Lawrence Kohlberg, which put a capacity for detachment, abstraction and universalisation at its apex. According to this measure of moral maturity, female adolescents consistently scored lower than male because they were more likely to respond to moral dilemmas by seeing them in terms of specific contexts of relationship and obligation, as opposed to relating the dilemmas back to universal principles. Gilligan argued that this moral hierarchy reflected biases towards forms of moral reasoning that were not actually any more mature, responsible or complex than those demonstrated by women, and that an 'ethic of care' should be seen as equally morally mature to an 'ethic of justice'.

Gilligan's work provoked a large amount of controversy on both empirical and theoretical grounds. It was argued that her claims were not properly grounded in evidence about the actual moral reasoning of young men and women, and that to the extent they were grounded, it was in a very narrow (white, middle class) sample of moral subjects. At the theoretical level, many feminist scholars were concerned that Gilligan's argument supported an essentialised, maternalist and stereotypical account of cognitive differences between men and women. At the same time, other feminist scholars embraced and built, in a variety of critical ways, on the idea of an 'ethic of care' as a distinctively feminist ethic, notably scholars such as Sarah Ruddick, Joan Tronto and specifically in International Relations, Fiona Robinson (Robinson and Confortini, 2014). It's not my purpose to adjudicate on these issues in this blog, but it provides a very interesting contemporary context in which to revisit women international thinkers writing on moral theory and moral questions prior to Gilligan's work. As is so often the case, we find opposing positions on the distinctiveness of women's moral reasoning prefigured in the work of earlier thinkers, for example in the work of Jane Addams (1860-1935) and Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001).

The idea that women had distinctive moral strengths, as opposed to, or perhaps in tandem with, being inherently morally inferior to men, became particularly influential in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century, specifically with reference to white bourgeois women. These distinctive strengths were associated with women's roles as mothers and carers, and fitted in with the idealisation of white middle class women as 'angels of the hearth'. As a childless and independent woman whose most intimate relationships were with other women, Jane Addams did not conform to this ideal in the way she lived her own life. Nevertheless, she was influenced by maternalism and her work was often addressed to women as mothers, who were also a major part of her actual audience. She undoubtedly drew on the idea that women were in many ways morally superior to men, in particular when it came to the resolution of conflict and the avoidance of violence. However it is by no means clear that she saw this as reflecting innate differences as opposed to differences in economic, social and political positionality between men and women. We can see this in her spoof article on a world in which women had the franchise and men did not (Addams, 1913). We also see evidence for her views about women in her moral theory, a distinctive form of moral pragmatism, in which orientations towards peace and democracy drove an experimental approach to real-world ethical questions about how to respond to issues of conflict and difference in an increasingly complex industrialised world. In her arguments for pacifism, Addams clearly links war to masculinist modes of thinking, and sees women as able to offer distinctive moral insights into peace and peacemaking. As is well known, Addams was committed to pacifism and to the complete rejection of the values inherent in militarism and nationalism (Addams 1907; 1964).

In contrast to Addams, there is no evidence that Elizabeth Anscombe thought of women has having a distinctive set of moral values or a different approach to moral reasoning from men. Anscombe was born at the same time as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, under Jane Addams's presidency, was being set up with the aim of contributing to a pacifist agenda in the nascent League of Nations. Anscombe was a professional philosopher, originally a student of Wittgenstein, she wrote across a range of philosophical topics and is well known for her work on ethics, including the ethics of war. As a Catholic, she drew on the traditions of just war thinking, but in a form that borrowed also from Kantian, deontological approaches to the meaning of moral principles, she was famously dismissive of moral consequentialism (Anscombe, 1981). Anscombe was the mother of several children and virulently anti-abortion, but for her there was no such thing as a different voice in terms of moral thought, thinking was either moral or it wasn't. This manifested itself most famously in her one-woman protest against the award of an honorary degree to President Truman (Anscombe, 1956; see British Pathé News video). In Anscombe's eyes, Truman had to be seen as a murderer because of his authorisation of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which resulted in the deaths of many thousands who could not be considered as legitimate targets. In traditional just war terms this was the slaughter of thousands of innocents. In her argument against Truman's actions, Anscombe also targets pacifism as a morally reprehensible doctrine. On her account, pacifists would not be willing to kill anyone, even in defence of the innocent or to punish the guilty, whereas militarists are prepared to kill everyone, guilty and innocent alike. Both militarism and pacifism, for her, fail to make this most basic moral discrimination.

The contrast between Addams and Anscombe in their approach to moral thinking and in their views about pacifism clearly complicate over-simplified claims about women having a different moral voice. In some ways the distinction between them foreshadows the debates that followed the publication of Gilligan's work. In other ways, however, they force us to reckon with the complexity of women's moral thinking and the impossibility of reducing it to a choice between 'care' and 'justice'. Addams embraced ideas about how women's position gave them privileged moral insights into the huge moral failures of aggressive nationalism and mass slaughter. But her own moral arguments were characterised by a commitment to democracy and peace that was universal in its scope, and open-ended in terms of what institutions and practices might help serve the ends of democracy and peace. For her, Anscombe's moral thought would be seen as too narrowly focused, refusing to see beyond an oversimplified set of distinctions between innocent and guilty, or to think about war as grounded in a much broader institutional and ideological context, which needed itself to be the subject of moral judgment. Conversely, Anscombe clearly appropriates an ethic of justice and is sharply focused on the drawing of distinctions between moral innocence and moral culpability. In this respect, she foreshadows recent work in 'revisionist' just war theory and would share with those theorists a deep concern about how refraining from violence may itself perpetrate injustice. Looking back at women's international ethical thought pre-empts any easy judgments about women's moral voice.

References

Addams, J. (1913) "If Men Were Seeking the Franchise", Ladies Home Journal June 1913, http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/power/text12/addams.pdf

Addams, J. (1907) Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan Company)

Addams, J. (1964) Democracy and Social Ethics (Harvard: Harvard University Press)

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1956) Mr Truman's Degree (Oxford: Oxonian Press).

Anscombe, G. E. M. ed. (1981). "War and Murder." In Ethics, Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers Volume III. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Harvard: Harvard University Press)

Robinson, F. and Confortini, C. C. (2014) "Symposium: Maternal thinking for international relations? Papers in Honor of Sara Ruddick", Journal of International Political Theory, 10 (1): pp. 38 - 45.